Anything or more and less

Social networking is only fun if you have somebody to social network with, that’s the case in all form of reality the digital as well as the non digital. If you are using ~friendica there are several ways to find interesting people. None of them involves scrolling through the user directory although this can be fun too!

The 1st step in your search process should be your default profile. Scroll a bit down to the Public Keywords and enter some reflecting your interests and yourself. Those keywords will be published along with your profile picture in the public user directory (hover the star in the corner of some user pictures). You can also add additional keywords into the field below. Those private keywords will not show up on the user directory. You should enter the keywords in English and your native tongue, except you don’t want to have international contacts but the network is relatively small and English keywords could provide better results.

Once you have filled in your interests go to the Contacts tab¹ where you find a listing of your current contacts. Depending on your theme this page will look differently, but at the side there will be a menu.

At the top of this menu you find the add new contact box which can be used to add any contact from a service that ~friendica supports², followed by a list of the groups you have created to sort your contacts³. Below these two things you find the tools to find new contacts.

1st a search box. If you are interested in something, say “opensource” you can enter it there and ~friendica will search for profiles with matching public and private keywords.

If you now search for Linux there will be some more results, you have to play a bit with the search. Not everybody thinks about the same keywords you think about.

Below the search box there are three links. The third Invite Friends is self-explanatory but what are the other two for?

If you click on the first link Similar Interests ~friendica will match your keywords against the public keywords of other user in the global user directory. When you use this link without entering any keywords, friendica will tell you to do so.

Once you have found some friends you can use the 2nd link Friend Suggestions which will offer you a selection of the friends of your friends. These suggestions are drawn from all the networks your friends are connected to. At the moment I see suggestions from friendica, Diaspora*, identi.ca and Twitter.

And finally, if you have a homepage or blog and use friendica, you should consider linking your profile so that visitors stumbling over your web content can link to your friendica account for further networking.

Have fun

¹ when you are logged in you’ll find it at (your friendica server)/contacts/

² ~friendica, Diaspora*, OStatus / StatusNet (identi.ca), Twitter, RSS feeds…

³ these are similar to the aspects of circles of other networks